Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture

Carel van Schaik (2004)

Belknap Press

ISBN 0-674-01577-0 (hardback) £19.95 / $29.95

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Only 10 years ago, one had to say that wild orangutans were solitary and non-technological apes, based on field studies done largely in Borneo.  Now we know that they are sociable tool-users living at high densities (>10 individuals/km2) in the swamp forests of Sumatra.  The transformation in our ideas stems from the field research of Carel van Schaik and his team done at Suaq Baliming over 1993-1999, and that work is the basis for this excellent book.  The author leaves no doubt as to the need to reconfigure our views of Pongo pygmaeus:

“The swamp has revealed our red cousins to be every bit as sociable, as technically adept, and as culturally capable as their African relative, the chimpanzee” (p. ix)

To a long-standing chimpologist, this is indeed a challenge!

Sumatran forests in seasonally inundated, nutrient-rich soils produce succulent fruits year-round in a diversity of trees (unlike the seasonal masting of dipterocarps elsewhere in the region).  This plentiful food enables the world’s largest arboreal mammals to be socially tolerant, and lots of ramifications follow.  For example, Suaq’s orangutans spend on average 15% of their waking hours in insectivory.  They travel together, rather than just congregate at fruiting trees.  They even have time to engage in technological masturbation.  (This may be the first time that the word dildo has appeared in a primatological publication!)

The book is written semi-popularly in large (21 x 25 mm) format, with superscripts referring to endnotes, rather than citations, but there are more than 200 references listed.  It is gloriously illustrated with 143 high-quality colour plates, although curiously about half of these are uncaptioned.  The writing style is crisp and breezey.  (How is it that the Dutch, e.g. Niko Tinbergen, Frans de Waal, so often can write better English than native-English-speakers?)  All in all, the book is tremendous value at the price; at the very least the photographs will make for great scanning.

Most of the book is compelling natural history.  Orangutans (unlike other apes) really do build nests with roofs.  Oral tool use is the norm.  Notable differences exist between the red apes of Borneo and Sumatra, e.g. in terms of female bonding.  Van Schaik’s training with van Hooff in classical ethology serves him well in terms of noting crucial details in behaviour, but even he admits that following orangutans is sometimes “as exciting as watching paint dry”.  One chapter is titled “Life in slow motion.”

Three chapters focus on the book’s subtitle, that is, on technology, culture and their human implications, which will come as no surprise to readers of van Schaik’s recent journal articles.  He presents rich descriptive and analytical findings on the apes’ use of stick tools to harvest the seeds of cemengang (Neesia) fruits.  The case for across-populational variation explained in terms of social transmission is persuasive.  He presents a four-level framework for understanding nonhuman culture as label, skill, symbol and institution.  The key he says is social tolerance (yet surprisingly, the implications of this vis-à-vis knowledge as a sequesterable resource or the problem of free-riders are never raised).

The book is not without problems:  The spectre of infanticide is raised as part of the explanation for orangutan social structure, but it has never been seen.  The origins of modern humans is dated at about 50 k or 150 k or a few 100 k years ago, at different points in the book.  The tendency to collaborate with non-kin is said to be unique to great apes.  Most disappointingly, there is a pervasive reverence for the human version of culture, in such statements as: “Human culture is infinitely more complex than chimpanzee or orangutan cultures or traditions.” (p. 15)  Infinitely?

The sting in the book’s tail comes in the last chapter on conservation.  It is entirely possible that the orangutans of Suaq are no more.  Victims of uncontrolled forest clearance and hunting, they may have expired since the last scientists were there in 1999.  Even van Schaik admits that for a local person being a conservationist is maladaptive, in the mad rush for valuable timber.  Ironies abound:  As Christian proselytizing overcomes traditional Muslim devoutness, so do prohibitions on eating apes fade away.  And then there is the whimper that is sometimes missed when we focus on the bang:  Even if we save the orangutan as a species from extermination, their surviving culture may be too impoverished, having fallen below some threshold of broken social transmission, to be reconstituted.

Finally, what of van Schaik’s claims of equality between Pan and Pongo?  Some claims of similarity, such as for food sharing, especially of meat, are made but not developed in the book.  Other parallels go only so far:  Like chimpanzees extracting bush babies from their nest, so do orangutans capture slow lorises, but orangutans do not hunt vertebrate prey, in the chimpanzee sense of the term.  Other comparisons offer stark contrasts:  There is no evidence of coalitions of any sort in orangutans, nor is there any evidence of pongicide, much less inter-group lethal aggression.  But before chimpologists crow, they should recall how little was known after the first 6 years of field study of chimpanzees.  Perhaps orangutans will continue to surprise us, if they are allowed to live to do so.

W.C. MCGREW

University of Cambridge